Ionian Islands

The Ionian Islands are a group of islands off the coast of western Greece in the Ionian Sea. The group includes seven principal islands as well as many smaller ones, and Kerkyra is the capital of the region. From 1363 to 1797, the islands were ruled by the Republic of Venice, which had conquered the islands from the Angevin Kingdom of Naples (Corfu in 1386, Zante in 1485, Cephalonia in 1500, Ithaca in 1503, and Lefkada in 1718). In 1797, the French First Republic annexed the islands during the French Revolutionary Wars, and the French ruled the islands until 1800, when the Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire occupied the islands and established a "Septinsular Republic". The French re-occupied these islands in 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars, but the British occupied the islands during the war. In 1815, the British dissolved the republic and replaced it with the "United States of the Ionian Islands", a protectorate that existed until 1864, when the British agreed to cede the islands to Greece to bolster King George I of Greece's rule. In 2011, the Ionian Islands had a population of 207,855 people.